“Driving without lights, without the seat belt, and when you made that turn you traveled into the facing lane! Oh, is that fish you got there?” the skeletal apparition wheezed happily, poking its head into the window and looking over Lyapunov’s shoulder into the back seat.
“I won’t give you any money,” Lyapunov said sternly.
All of a sudden, the skeleton broke apart into three small boys in tattered clothes.
“Mister, we’re hungry, help us, ple-e-ase!” they sang out in unison. Their gaunt little faces would make a rock cry.
“To heck with you – here!” Lyapunov threw a couple of fishes out the window. The boys snatched them and vanished into the bushes.
In the village, he complained to his mother about the traffic police – they’re way out of line!
“You’re always judging people, Vanya,” his mother said. “And you should know better. To hear you say it, everyone’s just getting fat, and there are all kinds of people out there. Take Katya Pimenova – she lives on the other end of the village – her husband’s in the traffic police, and he’s skin and bones, a breeze could tip him over, but he works hard and does all the chores at home, and they have three kids, and he doesn’t drink but they’re poor all the same. Power’s gone to your head, Vanya – why did you ever want to mess with it?”
Ivan Nikanorovich did not argue with his mother, but threw back a shot of vodka, bit a pickle and went outside. It was frosty; the sky was pierced with stars. For some reason, he suddenly imagined his ancestor – how he walked across the Bakhchisarai market, naked, with his ears and nostrils sewn shut, the crowds cursing him with words he couldn’t understand. The vodka spread warm throughout Ivan Nikanorovich’s body. He brushed off a quick tear, turned, and went inside, to sleep.
Institute of Dreams
A small diesel engine pulled a local train along the narrow-gauge line between Soggy Tundra and Stargorod. It was December 24, and Nikita Yurievich Kostochkin was on his way home from a business trip. It had been three years since his wife Alyona died, leaving him alone with his daughter Masha, now a student at the university. Masha’s boyfriend was an asshole, but Kostochkin did not believe he had the right to talk to his daughter about this, and, on top of that, he was afraid of being abandoned by her in their three-room apartment. At the moment, however, on his way home, he wanted nothing less than to walk in on the boyfriend staring idiotically into the TV in his kitchen.
There was a time when Nikita Yurievich worked at a museum, where he collected folklore by traveling around the region. In the 90s, the position at the museum was cut, so he found work at a new place called The Institute of Dreams. Its 10 employees published dream interpretation guides, read coffee-grounds, recorded Gypsy predictions about the future of the country, and had a director who in all seriousness declared that their mission was to teach people to see and appreciate their dreams on a whole new level – to become what he called “cognizant dreamers.” Nikita Yurievich did not bother to look for a deeper meaning in the director’s bullshit, and instead continued to collect the same old folklore he’d always cared about – along with the new legends that were being born right before his eyes.
Kostochkin always traveled second-class – he could count on meeting fascinating characters there. This day was no exception: a drifter who boarded the train in Emmaus informed him that the station had been named after one Emma Us, an old-timey landlady who was built like a grenadier and loved nothing more than shooting hares.
“She’d shoot 240 of them in a day!” the drifter boasted, as proud as if he’d counted the bodies himself.
The drifter had never heard of the vision of the Risen Christ that had appeared in Emmaus to some travelers, only snorted dismissively when Nikita Yurievich mentioned it, then turned to the old lady on the seat next to him and proceeded to enlighten her about the ongoing battle between the forces of White and Black magic. The forces of Light were currently being represented by Kaloyev, the guy who stabbed a Swissair traffic controller, and who had just been let out of Swiss jail.
“Because he fought a German!” the hobo proudly declared.
“You mean a Swiss,” Kostochkin corrected.
“How’s that different?” the hobo snapped back. “Those Krauts opened a gravel pit in Kozhino, next thing you know they’ll take the whole country down, stone by stone. One of our guys has had a dream about it.”
“It’s German Christmas today,” the old lady piped in. “Whatever dream you get will come true. Only the dreams tonight don’t bode well – that’s because the Laodokian Angel leaves his post to revere St. Nicholas; we are orphaned for the night. My neighbor dreamt on this night in 1991 about Gorbachev, and the spot on his head shrank in her dream into a dot. And the very next morning he said goodbye to everyone on TV, and they lowered the Soviet flag over the Kremlin!”
Nikita Yurievich sat there silently, listening, committing things to memory. He’s already collected a bookful of such stories heard on the road. Traditional dreams – the kind in which a fish means pregnancy, a dog is a friend, and losing one’s teeth betokens death – have come to seem common and boring to him; they were a legacy of another time, and gravitated to notions popularized in Martyn Zadeka’s fortune-telling book that enjoyed great popularity among the Russians in the middle of the nineteenth century. The new folklore, in its living, passionate, confusing, sometimes raving spontaneity, reflected the condition of the common mind and was, to Nikita Yurievich, far more interesting.
His fellow travelers, having bonded over their long and substantive conversation, got off the train together at some small station. The diesel engine strained, the car rocked hard on the rails, and the storm tossed handfuls of snow against the window. Kostochkin fell asleep. He dreamed of a child, a girl of magnificent beauty – they were picking mushrooms in the forest together and laughing happily about something. The girl looked both like his daughter Masha and his late wife Alyona.
When Kostochkin woke up, the train was already pulling up to Stargorod’s platform. He took the back way home from the railway station, cutting through the dark yards, and yet he couldn’t shake off his dream. If you see a maiden, that means a marvel, a miracle is near, Zadeka maintained – a naive interpretation based on the similarity between the words “maiden” and “marvel.” Kostochkin expected no miracles.
Masha, fortunately, was home alone. On the occasion of Christmas, albeit Catholic, she had roasted a duck with sour Antonov apples, and bought a bottle of champagne. Nikita Yurievich told her about his dream and, jokingly, suggested they drink to a miracle. That’s when his daughter broke down and told him she was pregnant, but added sternly that she would never even consider marrying the child’s father, and called him an asshole.
“That’s great – there’ll be three of us!” Nikita Yurievich hugged his daughter and spent a long time holding her and stroking her hair.
That night he dreamed he saw the Angel of Laodokia, carved into a schooner’s bow. The ship flew up to visit St. Nicholas. He, Kostochkin, stood at the helm, and a fishing net long as the Milky Way hung down from the stern. Snow fell all around them, flakes coming to rest atop Martyn Zadeka’s book, forgotten on the ground below. Suddenly, the volume changed its shape and turned into the map of his country, except that instead of its name the letters written across its curving expanse spelled “The Institute of Dreams.”
Tiny trains sped through the snowstorm in all directions, their passengers slept, and their dreams, colorful like candy wrappers, flew up and fluttered towards the stars, but were caught instead in the mesh of the ship’s fishing net. Nikita Yurievich realized that he was inside a “cognizant” dream. In his sleep, he hid his face in his hands, to make sure he wouldn’t wake up, the way he used to do a long time ago, when he was a little boy.